|
|
|
Susun Weed - EzineArticles.com Expert Author
The author, Susun Weed, has been living the simple life for more than 30 years as an herbalist, goat keeper, homesteader, and feminist. In addition to being the author of four highly-acclaimed books on herbs and women's health, Susun lectures world-wide as the voice of the Wise Woman tradition, personally supervises 400+ correspondence students, is editor-in-chief of Ash Tree Publishing, and directs the activities of the Wise Woman Center, where she trains apprentices in ... [More]
[View Susun Weed's Extended Author Bio]
[Display Categories] Sort By [Title] [Newest] [Oldest]
- Wise Woman Ways to Prevent Depression
[Health-and-Fitness:Depression] Herbal tonics can help us lighten up and stay healthier all winter. My favorite winter tonics are sunlight, St. Joan's wort tincture, elder berry tincture, linden infusion, sauerkraut, and organ meats.
- Wise Woman Ways to Boost Your Energy
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] Almost every woman has, at one time or another, felt so fatigued she wanted to cry. But for some women, and for a variety of reasons - including menopause, caring for a new-born, working odd hours, chronic anxiety, and poverty, to name only a few - fatigue is a constant, not an occasional, problem.
- Menopausal Years - Using Herbs Simply and Safely
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] Plants feed us, clothe us, house us, heal us, and kill us. There's no way around it, when you use herbs, you need to be alert and aware. Here are some ways to be sure you're using herbs safely.
- Living Generously - The Wise Woman Way
[Self-Improvement] Living generously is a theme that plays loudly in many women's lives. As women, our social conditioning - and often the impulse of our hearts - is to live generously by giving generously. And we give the one thing we have assured access to: ourselves.
- Healthy Menopausal Years - The Wise Woman Way
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] Menopause is a time of enormous change. Wise women of all times have found simple life-style changes can make their Change much easier. For optimum health during and after menopause, follow these simple steps.
- Energy & Stamina the Wise Woman Way
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] If having enough energy to earn your daily bread and to get all your chores done is a struggle for you. If you go to bed tired, but wake up even more tired. If you can't get up and go without coffee, or can't slow down and relax without alcohol. If your fatigue is ruining your mood and your friendships. Then it's time to build energy and stamina the Wise Woman Way.
- Depressed? Wise Woman Ways Offer a Helping Hand
[Health-and-Fitness:Depression] Winter time is depression time for many women. Perhaps it is harder to look at the bright side when days are short, perhaps the holidays and family demands take their toll on us. Of course, depression can also be triggered by lack of thyroid hormone and by use of steroids, high blood pressure drugs, and ERT/HRT.
- Dealing With Trich - Trichomonas Vaginalis - The Wise Woman Way
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] Trich is normally present in a woman's vagina, intestines, and rectum without causing problems. Trich is pH sensitive. When the vagina becomes alkaline, trich overwhelms the healthy flora and causes symptoms. A trich infection, or overgrowth, is difficult to diagnosis (without a microscope) and harder still to kill (without poisons).
- Dealing With Fibromyalgia - The Wise Woman Way
[Health-and-Fitness:Pain-Management] "Dear woman," Grandmother Growth's voice seems to float in the deepening twilight, echoing, reverberating, ringing in your ears. "Bring me your soreness. Bring me your pain. Bring your aches to me. Bring your burdens. Bring all you can no longer stand, can no longer bear, can no longer carry, can no longer shoulder, can no longer be responsible for."
- Back Ache First Aid Tips - The Wise Woman Way
[Health-and-Fitness:Back-Pain] Heat - a warm bath, a hot shower, a hydroculator, a hot water bottle, a towel dipped in boiling water - will provide temporary relief for most backaches. Tiger Balm, Olbas, Zheng Gu Shui, Wintergreen oil and other homemade or purchased herbal liniments and rubs can penetrate into deep muscle tissue to relieve tension and pain. They work best if followed by moist heat.
- The Bladder - Urinary Incontinence
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] Use the six steps of healing and wise woman ways to deal with incontinence. Avoid the expensive tests needed for a diagnosis of incontinence.
- Can Breast Cancer Be Prevented?
[Cancer:Breast-Cancer] Sometimes it seems that every magazine, newspaper, radio show, and piece of mail has a headline declaring that every woman's risk of developing breast cancer is increasing. There is a numbing feeling of inevitability in these pronouncements. More and more women think about breast cancer as a when rather than an if. Susun discusses what can be done.
- The Bladder - Urge Incontinence
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] As the majority of cases of urge incontinence are idiopathic, that is, they have no known cause, even after extensive testing, spare yourself the health risks of invasive tests. It is estimated that 34 million Americans deal with overactive bladder, defined as an urgent and frequent need to urinate, or urinating more than 10 times in 24 hours. Most are older than 40, and one-third to one-half are men.
- Afraid of Anthrax? Strengthen Your Immune System
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] Anthrax. Smallpox. Plague. Diseases that can kill. Diseases that are now in the hands of terrorists. What if these diseases were released in your hometown, or the place where you work? What could you do if vaccines and treatments were in short supply or unavailable? Is there anything you can do now to prepare yourself and improve your chances of survival?
- Feeling Frisky? Herbs For Fertility
[Home-and-Family:Pregnancy] For thousands of years knowledge of the herbs and wild plants that could increase fertility were the secrets of the village wise women. But after the holocaust against European Wise Women (the "burning times") and the virtual extermination of Native American medicine women, this knowledge virtually disappeared. In fact, many people erroneously believe that "primitive people" had no means of controlling the likelihood of pregnancy. Nothing could be further from the truth.
- This is Menopause - Journey Into Change
[Womens-Interests:Menopause-HRT] There is no doubt in your mind. Your menstrual cycles are coming to an end. You are in the midst of your menopausal climax years.
- Be Your Own Herbal Expert - Pt 8
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] Herbal medicine is the medicine of the people. It is simple, safe, effective, and free. Our ancestors used - and our neighbors around the world still use - plant medicines for healing and health maintenance.
- Be Your Own Herbal Expert - Pt 6
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] In this, our sixth session, we remain in the herbal pharmacy and turn our attention to herbs in fat bases. We'll explore fresh infused oils, ointments, salves, and lip balms, essential oils, and even herbal pestos.
- Be Your Own Herbal Expert - Pt 4
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] In this lesson, you will learn how to how make herbal tinctures. You will make tinctures from fresh and dried roots as well as from fresh flowers and leaves. Then you will collect your tinctures into an Herbal Medicine Chest and begin to use them.
- Be Your Own Herbal Expert - Pt 3
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] In this lesson you will explore the differences between nourishing, tonifying, stimulating/sedating, and potentially-poisonous plants. You will learn how to prepare and use them for greatest effect and most safety.
- Be Your Own Herbal Expert - Pt 2
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] In your first lesson, you learned how to "listen" to the messages of plant's tastes. And you discovered that using plants in water bases (teas, infusions, vinegars, soups) - and as simples - allows you to experiment with and explore herbal medicine safely. In this lesson, we will learn how to make effective water-based herbal remedies and talk more about using simples.
- Be Your Own Herbal Expert - Pt 1
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] Herbal medicine is the medicine of the people. It is simple, safe, effective, and free. Our ancestors knew how to use an enormous variety of plants for health and well-being. Our neighbors around the world continue to use local plants for healing and health maintenance. You can too.
- Fatigue and Mood Changes
[Home-and-Family:Pregnancy] Hormonal changes, emotional changes, physical changes, and all the attendant stresses of pregnancy may cause extreme fatigue and emotional swings, especially during the last trimester. Use exercise, relaxation, meditation, diet, and herbs to improve your energy and moods, but don't neglect emotional and spiritual work.
- The Bladder - Stress Incontinence
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] Do drink enough. But limiting fluids, especially before exercise, can help if you are dealing with stress incontinence.
- Mammograms - Who Needs Them?
[Cancer:Breast-Cancer] Perhaps no aspect of breast cancer is more widely publicized than screening mammography. Ads on television, in magazines, and in the daily paper urge women to deal with fear about breast cancer by having a yearly mammogram. We're even told that doing this is a way to "really care for yourself."
- White Pine (Pinus Strobus) - Great Tree of Peace
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] The warming air of this verdant May morning touches my senses with pine. In the sweet scented shade of a towering white pine much like the one I now sit under, the Peaceful Nations buried their weapons. I breathe deeply, asking their ancient wisdom to flow into me with the refreshing pine smell.
- Weight Gain
[Health-and-Fitness:Weight-Loss] The best ally you can have on your menopausal journey is ten "extra" pounds. When thin and young is the standard of beauty, any menopausal woman might find it difficult to maintain a positive self-image as she sees herself becoming a thick-waisted, silver-haired Crone.
- Frolicking With the Fairies
[Home-and-Family:Gardening] My friend Elsa always talked to plants. I thought she was crazy. Safely insane, but definitely disassociated from reality.
- Genital Warts - Human Papilloma Virus (HPV)
[Health-and-Fitness:Diseases-STDs] "I am the Grandmother of all growth, all growing things, all life. I am the grandmother of bacteria and viruses as well as plants and animals, fish and insects. When you throb with life these other lives live with you."
- The Cervix
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] What is it? What are some of the diseases that can afflict it and how best should we deal with them?
- Baba Yaga Stories
[Womens-Interests] Who is Baba Yaga? She is the Goddess, she is the Witch, she is the Wise Woman, she is the Crone, she is aged Artemis.
- Herbal Allies For Post-Menopausal Women - Pt 3-5
[Womens-Interests:Menopause-HRT] Plants containing flavonoids (from the Latin, flavus, yellow) were originally valued as dye plants. Today we appreciate them because we know they are anti-inflammatory, antihepatotoxic, anti-tumor, antimicrobial, antiviral, antioxidant, antiallergic, antiulcer, analgesic, and strengthening to the entire circulatory system, from capillaries to heart.
- Herbal Allies For Post Menopausal Women - Pt 2
[Womens-Interests:Menopause-HRT] My favorite herbs for post-menopausal women are horsetail, oatstraw, red clover, stinging nettle, seaweeds, and the plants rich in flavonoids. These gentle green allies are more like foods than drugs; they offer bone-creating, heart-protecting, disease-preventing, sex-enhancing optimum nourishment to the woman in the second half of her life.
- The Wise Woman Tradition Empowers Women
[Womens-Interests] The Wise Woman Tradition is the oldest known healing tradition on our planet. It offers a unique view of health that is woman-centered and deeply empowering to women. This is in stark contrast to orthodox - and most alternative - healing traditions, which are based on male viewpoints which disempower women.
- Headaches and Migraine Relief
[Health-and-Fitness:Headaches-Migraines] Menopause often brings relief to the woman who has had migraine headaches since adolescence. Other women experience headaches for the first time during menopause, usually the result of fatigue, stress, rapidly changing hormone levels racing through the liver, and rushes of kundalini moving into the crown area.
- Letting Nature Grow Your Garden
[Home-and-Family:Gardening] Your garden. What fun - and frustration - await you there! The best mentor you can choose, as far as I'm concerned, is Nature herself. Nature likes life everywhere. Have an open field and plants magically appear! This is the way plants grow when left to themselves. We don't have to struggle so much.
- Blood Mysteries
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] Blood mysteries teach that menstrual blood and birthing blood are holy blood, power blood, healing blood. The blood mysteries teach us to remember that life and healing come from and return to woman, to the wise woman, to the woman who bleeds and bleeds. And does not die.
- The Goddess is Alive in Every Woman
[Self-Improvement:Spirituality] The true story of how she came to be, how she disappeared, and how she returned. In the beginning, everything began, as it always does, with birth. The Great Mother of All gave birth, and the Earth began to breathe. Again, and again, and again, the Great Mother gave birth. And the plants began to breathe and the animals began to breathe and the two-legged ones began to breathe. All forms of life began to breathe. To breathe, to live. In the air, on the land, in the water, and even in the fires of deep sulfurous vents where light never shines, all forms of life began to breathe. And they were all very hungry.
- Colds - Hot and Cold - Winter Health
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] Winter is coming. So are colds and the flu. Here are some tips for preventing these viral illnesses. And for getting well fast if you do get sick.
- Help For Women With Fibroids
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] Uterine fibroids are solid muscle tissue growths in the uterus. They are also called fibroid tumors, myomas, or leiomyomas. Fibroids occur so frequently (in up to half of all women over forty) that they could be considered a normal irregularity. The occasional fibroid can become enormous (medical literature reports one that was 100 pounds!), but the majority (80%) remain as small as a walnut.
- Achieve Instant Calm
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] Here are a number of approaches women can use to calm jangly nerves, achieve greater overall calm, and cope on-the-spot with stressful situations. Unfreeze yourself.
- After a Cesarean
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] Safe Use of Herbs After a Cesarean. Water-based infusions provide optimum benefit and greatest safety.
- Dealing With Vaginal Yeast
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] Virtually every woman alive has had one or more run-ins with vaginal yeast. Candida albicans is a single-celled organism, a kind of acidophilus. When the vaginal pH is acidic, Lactobaccillus rules. When the vaginal environment becomes alkaline, Candida proliferates. Candida - monilia, moniliasis, yeast, the whites, leucorrhea - is characterized by a thick, white, yeasty-smelling, lumpy, vaginal discharge which is highly irritating to the vulva. Candida can also live on the skin, nails, mouth, lungs, and feet (called athlete's foot); it is part of healthy intestinal flora. There is no connection between vaginal candida and overgrowth of candida anywhere else in the body.
- Herbal Allies For Post-Menopausal Women - Pt 1
[Womens-Interests:Menopause-HRT] My favorite herbs for postmenopausal women are horsetail, oatstraw, red clover, stinging nettle, seaweeds, and the plants rich in flavonoids. These gentle green allies are more like foods than drugs; they offer bone-creating, heart-protecting, disease-preventing, sex-enhancing optimum nourishment to the woman in the second half of her life.
- Here Comes the Flu Season
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] Along with the beauty of fall days comes the need to get ready for winter. Time to get out my long underwear and my warm wooly socks. Time to nourish my immune system so cold days won't be days of colds - and flu.
- Herbal Allies For Pregnant Women
[Home-and-Family:Pregnancy] Pregnancy is a special time. One that brings joys and pains. Many minor, but distressing health complaints can accompany pregnancy, such as morning sickness, varicose veins, skin discoloration, hemorrhoids, constipation, folic acid anemia, iron deficiency anemia, muscle/leg cramps, backache, heartburn, fatigue and mood changes, bladder infections, and high blood pressure. What can the expectant mother use that is safe for her unborn child as well as herself?
- Herbal Allies For Pregnancy Problems
[Home-and-Family:Pregnancy] Wise women believe that most of the problems of pregnancy can be prevented by attention to nutrition. Morning sickness and mood swings are connected to low blood sugar; backaches and severe labor pains often result from insufficient calcium; varicose veins, hemorrhoids, constipation, skin discoloration and anemia are evidence of lack of specific nutrients; pre-eclampsia, the most severe problem of pregnancy, is a form of acute malnutrition. Excellent nutrition includes pure water, controlled breath, abundant light, loving and respectful relationships, beauty and harmony in daily life, joyous thoughts and vital foodstuffs.
- Hairy Problems
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] Too much hair (on the chin), too little hair (on the scalp), falling hair, thinning hair, greying hair - no matter what the complaint, many women notice something happening to their hair during menopause. What can you do to alleviate these 'hairy problems'?
- Menopause Metamorphosis
[Womens-Interests:Menopause-HRT] "Menopause is a metamorphosis, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. The caterpillar needs a cocoon, and so do you. One of the most important things you can do during menopause is to take time for you. Go into your cave, go into your cocoon, go into your room and shut the door."
- Herbs That Ease Anxiety & Fear
[Self-Improvement:Stress-Management] Fear and anxiety are closely linked, but quite different. Fear is focused, anxiety is diffuse. Fear is health promoting and protective: it keeps us from jumping off cliffs. Anxiety can destroy health and increase our vulnerability: it shortens our breath, narrows our blood vessels, and interferes with the functioning of the immune system. Fear is useful energy; it calls to our courage. Anxiety is useless; it promotes feelings of insecurity, helplessness, weakness.
- Dry Vagina
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] We are given two contradictory pictures of post-menopausal sex. On one hand, we're to look forward to freedom from conception worries, resulting in more spontaneous, relaxed, joyful sex filled with multiple orgasms. On the other hand, we're to expect dried-up, atrophied vaginas and dyspareunia (painful intercourse).
- Breast Self-Massage is Simple
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] Breast self-massage offers a way to let go of tension and get in touch with yourself. This soothing, nurturing self-massage is a pleasurable and relaxing way to get to know your breasts. It avoids the worry of checking for cancer, while providing an excellent early-warning system should cancer arise.
- Building Better Bones
[Health-and-Fitness:Nutrition] Did you know that your bones are always changing? Every day of your life, some bone cells die and some new bone cells are created. From birth until your early 30s, you can easily make lots of bone cells. So long as your diet supplies the necessary nutrients, you not only replace bone cells that die, you have extras left over to lengthen and strengthen your bones.
- 8 Steps For a Woman Dancing With Cancer
[Cancer] Submit. Give up. Make room for the miracle.
- Bladder Infections
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] Bladder infections are also known as cystitis, urethritis, and UTIs (urinary tract infections). When bacteria grow in the bladder, the resulting infection usually causes symptoms such as: a burning sensation during voiding, overwhelming urgency, frequent but minuscule urinations, incontinence, bloody urine, and pelvic pain. Up to 25 percent of bladder infections in post- menopausal women are silent or symptomless.
- Amazing Artemesias
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] Artemis - Goddess of the herbalist - gives her name to a genus of marvelously aromatic, safely psychedelic, highly medicinal, dazzlingly decorative, and more-or-less edible plants in the Asteraceae family. I love Artemis, and I love her plants.
- Digestive Distress
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] As the mix of hormones in your blood changes during your premenopausal years, you may notice the effects on your gastrointestinal tract both directly - estrogen is a gastrointestinal stimulant and varying levels may swing you from loose stools to dry ones - and indirectly, as the hormonal load places ever heavier demands on the liver.
- Fertility After Forty
[Health-and-Fitness:Womens-Issues] The most fertile years of a woman's life are those between 18 and 28. Even into the mid-thirties, it is usually fairly easy to conceive and carry a pregnancy to term. During these years the hormones that control ovulation, enhance conception, and ensure a healthy pregnancy are usually made easily and in generous quantities. And detrimental life-style choices have not had decades of repetition to create chronic problems.
- The Bladder
[Health-and-Fitness:Alternative] I am the holding tank. I am the lowest point. It all flows down to me. The blood goes round and round, and the liver decides what stays and what goes. What goes, goes to the kidneys. And when the kidneys are done with what goes round, it goes down to me. It all comes down to me.
|
|
|
